We Do Not Part: A Novel

By Han Kang

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
FINALIST FOR THE ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE IN FICTION
LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD AND NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR
ONE OF THE ATLANTIC'S 10 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR

A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: THE NEW YORKER, TIME, THE ECONOMIST, THE GUARDIAN, SLATE, VULTURE, KIRKUS REVIEWS, BOOK RIOT, THE GLOBE AND MAIL, PEN AMERICA, CHICAGO PUBLIC LIBRARY • ONE OF BOOKPAGE’S TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR

Han Kang’s most revelatory book since The Vegetarian, We Do Not Part tells the story of a friendship between two women while powerfully reckoning with a hidden chapter in Korean history—“[A] masterpiece” (The Boston Globe)

“A haunting exploration of friendship amid historical trauma.”—Time

“A novel that is both disquieting and entrancing.”—The Economist

One winter morning in Seoul, Kyungha receives an urgent message from her friend Inseon to visit her at the hospital. Inseon has injured herself in an accident, and she begs Kyungha to return to Jeju Island, where she lives, to save her beloved pet—a white bird called Ama. A snowstorm hits the island when Kyungha arrives. She must reach Inseon’s house at all costs, but the icy wind and squalls slow her down as night begins to fall. She wonders if she will arrive in time to save the animal—or even survive the terrible cold that envelops her with every step. Lost in a world of snow, she doesn’t yet suspect the vertiginous plunge into darkness that awaits her at her friend’s house.

Blurring the boundaries between dream and reality, We Do Not Part powerfully brings to light the lost voices of the past to save them from oblivion. Both a hymn to an enduring friendship and an argument for remembering, it is the story of profound love in the face of unspeakable pain—and a celebration of life, however fragile it might be.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Jan 21, 2025
• ISBN: 9780593595473

Book preview

Part 1: Bird

1

Crystals

A sparse snow was falling.

I stood on flat land that edged up a low hill. Along the brow of this hill and down its visible face to the seam of the plain, thousands of black tree trunks jutted from the earth. They varied in height, like a crowd of people ranging in age, and were about as thick as railway sleepers, though nowhere near as straight. Stooped and listing, they gave the impression of a thousand men, women, and haggard children huddling in the snow.

Was this a graveyard? I wondered. Are these gravestones?

I walked past the torsos—treetops lopped off, exposed cross sections stippled with snowflakes that resembled salt crystals; I passed the prostrating barrows behind them. My feet stilled as I noticed the sensation of water underfoot. That’s strange, I thought. Within moments the water was up to my ankles. I looked back. What I saw astonished me: the far horizon turned out to be the shoreline. And the sea was crashing in.

The words tumbled from my lips: Who would bury people in such a place?

The current was strong. Had the tide surged in and out like this each day? Were the lower mounds hollowed out, the bones long since swept away?

There was no time. The graves already underwater were out of reach, but the remains higher up the slope, I needed to move them to safety. Now, before the sea encroached further. But how? There was no one around. I had no shovel. How would I get to them all? At a loss, I ran through the thicket of black trees, knees cleaving the rising water.

When I opened my eyes, the day had yet to break. The snowy field, the black torsos, the flood tide were gone; the only thing that met my stare was the window of my darkened room. I shut my eyes. Another dream about G—, it had to be. At this thought, I covered my lids with the cold palm of my hand and lay there unmoving.

---

The dream had come to me in the summer of 2014, a couple of months after the publication of my book about the massacre in G—. Over the next four years, it had never occurred to me to question the dream’s connection to that city. But this summer I began to wonder if there might be something more to it. If my quick, intuitive conclusion had either been in error or an oversimplification.

The sweltering night heat hadn’t let up for three weeks. Once again, I was lying under the broken air conditioner in my sitting room, hoping for sleep. I’d already taken several cold showers, but though I lay on the bare floor, my sweat-drenched body wouldn’t cool. Finally, around five in the morning, the temperature began to drop. It was to be a brief grace, as the sun would be up in another half hour. But I felt I might sleep at last, and had in fact nearly drifted off, when the plain rolled in beneath my closed lids: snow scattering over rows of black timber; glimmering snowflakes studding the severed torsos like salt; all of it before my eyes, as vivid as day.

I don’t know what set it off, the shaking. My body seemed to be racked by sobs, though my eyes remained dry. Was this terror? Or anxiety, agitation, perhaps an abrupt anguish? No, it was a bone-chilling awareness. That a giant, invisible knife—the weight of its heavy blade beyond any human capacity to wield it—hung in the air, with me as its target. As I lay pinned and staring.

The black-blue sea billowing in to dredge the bones away from beneath the mounds—it occurred to me for the first time that this might not be an allusion to the massacred people and the decades that followed. It could simply be a personal omen. Yes, perhaps that landscape of flooded graves and silent headstones was an intimation brought forward in time, a sign of what remained of my life to come.

This very moment, in other words.

---

In the four years between the first time I had the dream and that early summer morning, I had parted ways with several people in my life. Some of these partings had been by choice, while others had caught me entirely unawares; I’d fought the latter with everything I had. If, as various ancient faiths say, there exists in a celestial realm or a netherworld an immense mirror that observes and logs everyone’s movements, I’m sure the last three to four years of my life as recorded there must resemble a snail coming out of its shell to push along a knife’s edge. A body desiring to live. A body pricked and nicked. A body spurning, embracing, clinging. A body kneeling. A body entreating. A body seeping blood or pus or tears.

Then in late spring of this year, with the struggle done, I had signed the lease on a flat in an open-corridor apartment complex just outside Seoul. I had no one left to take care of and no job to get to, though it would take a while for this fact to sink in. I’d worked for many years to make a living and support my family. This had always been the priority. If I wrote at all, it was by cutting back on sleep while nursing a secret hope that one day I’d be given as much time as I desired to write. But by spring any such longing had vanished.

I let my things lie wherever the movers had blithely unpacked them, and spent most of my time in bed, though I barely slept. This went on until July. I didn’t cook. I didn’t venture outside. I subsisted on water and small quantities of rice and white kimchi that I ordered online and had delivered, and when the migraines and abdominal spasms hit, I vomited up what I had eaten. I’d already sat down one night and written out a will. In a letter that simply began Please see to the following, I had briefly noted which box in which drawer held my bank books, certificate of insurance, and lease agreement, how much of my money I wished to be spent to what end, and to whom the rest of my savings should be delivered. As for the person who was to carry out this request, I drew a blank, and the space where the name of the recipient should go remained empty. I couldn’t decide who, if anyone, deserved such an imposition. I tried adding a word or two of thanks and apology by saying I’d make sure to compensate them for their trouble and specifying an amount, but I still couldn’t settle on a name.

What finally roused me out of the mire of my bed, after weeks of struggling to sleep, was my sense of responsibility toward this unidentified recipient. Calling to mind my few acquaintances, one of whom, though the exact person was yet to be determined, would be left to deal with any loose ends, I started putting the flat in order. The rows of empty water bottles in the kitchen, the clothing and blankets that were sure to be a nuisance, any personal records, diaries, and notes had to be discarded. With the initial bundles of trash in each hand, I slipped on a pair of sneakers and opened the front door for the first time in two months. The summer sun flooded the west-facing corridor; the afternoon light was a revelation. I rode the elevator down, passed by the guard’s room, crossed the compound square—and felt, all the while, that I was witnessing something. The lived-in world. The day’s weather. The humidity in the air and the pull of gravity.

Returning upstairs, I walked past the mounds of fabric and into the bathroom. I turned the hot water on and sat under the shower fully dressed. The tiles beneath my curled feet, the steam gradually making it hard to breathe, the cotton shirt growing heavy as it plastered against my back, the water sluicing down my forehead, and the hair, which by now covered my eyes to my chin, chest, stomach: I can feel each and every sensation still.

I walked out of the bathroom, peeled off my sodden outfit, rummaged around and put on what decent clothes I could find. I folded two 10,000-won notes into little squares, slipped them into my pocket, and went outside. I walked to a juk shop behind a nearby subway station and ordered what seemed the mildest item on their menu, a pine-nut juk. I took my time with the unduly hot bowl of rice porridge and, as I did, people walked past the window in bodies that looked fragile enough to shatter. Life was exceedingly vulnerable, I realized. The flesh, organs, bones, breaths passing before my eyes all held within them the potential to snap, to cease—so easily, and by a single decision.

That is how death avoided me. Like an asteroid thought to be on a collision course avoids Earth by a hair’s breadth, hurtling past at a furious velocity that knows neither regret nor hesitation.

---

I had not reconciled with life, but I had to resume living.

Close to two months of seclusion and near-starvation had left me with considerable muscle loss. To break the cycle of migraines, stomach spasms, and caffeine-rich painkillers, I needed to eat and move with regularity. But before I could attempt anything in earnest, the heatwave set in. On the first day the mercury climbed past our average body temperature, I turned on the air conditioner the previous tenant had left behind, only to discover it was broken. When my calls to various AC repair companies finally got through, I was invariably told that they were inundated with requests at the moment due to the extreme weather and the earliest anyone could pay a visit was in late August. Buying a new AC unit wasn’t any easier.

The wise thing would have been to seek shelter in cool indoor spaces. But I couldn’t face being around other people in cafés or libraries or banks. So I did what I could: lie plastered on the sitting-room floor and try to keep my body temperature down, take frequent cold-water showers to prevent heat exhaustion, and venture outside for some juk around eight o’clock when the swelter had dissipated somewhat. The shop’s conditioned air was incredibly pleasant, while outside, past the windows that were as steamed up as on a winter’s night, people surged forward, each clutching a portable fan aimed at their face as they headed home for the night. Filling the tropical-night streets whose heat, like eternity, wouldn’t let up, and which in due time I would have to re-enter.

On one of those nights, I walked out of the shop and stopped at a crossing, where I felt a rush of hot air on my face from the still-warm asphalt. I had to resume my letter, I thought. No, I had to start afresh. I would write a new note to replace the missive addressed to no one, the one I’d slipped into an envelope marked Last Will in permanent ink. I would start from scratch. I would change tack.

---

But to write it, I first had to think.

When had everything begun to fall apart?

Where was the fork in the road?

Which rift and which break had been the tipping point?

There are people who brandish their sharpest weapon as they are taking their leave. We know this from experience. They do this so as to slice the tenderest part of the person they are leaving with the precision that proximity grants us.

---

I don’t want to live face down on the ground like you.

I’m leaving you so I can breathe.

I want to live, not be half-dead.

---

I started having nightmares in the winter of 2012, after I began researching the book I went on to write. Initially these were dreams of outright violence. Running from airborne troops, being bludgeoned on the shoulder, falling to the ground. I can’t recall the face of the uniformed man who kicked me in the flank as I lay sprawled on the ground and turned me over with his boots. What I do remember is the shudder that ran through me when he grabbed his gun with both hands and pushed the bayonet into my chest.

Not wanting to cast a gloom over my family—my daughter, especially—I found a writing space a fifteen-minute walk away from home. The plan was to limit my writing to that place and to return to daily life the moment I left it. The room was on the first floor of a brick house that had been built in the 1980s and hadn’t seen any repairs in three decades. I bought a tin of white water-based paint and daubed it over the heavily scratched metal door, then I hung a scarf above the room’s window to obscure the crack in the old wooden frame. From nine in the morning until noon on the days when I had classes to teach, and until five o’clock on the days when I didn’t, I went there to read materials I’d gathered or to make notes.

In the mornings and evenings, I continued to cook meals and sit down to eat with my family. I tried to have as many conversations as I could with my daughter, who had just started middle school and was encountering new situations at every turn. But I felt split in half. Even within those private moments, I could sense the shadow of the book lurking—when I turned on the gas ring and waited for the water in the pot to boil, or in the brief time it took to dredge tofu slices in egg wash and watch them crisp up on both sides.

The writing space was reached by a path running along a stream, and there was a section where the heavily tree-lined path sloped down before suddenly opening up. I had to walk across that exposed tract of land for about three hundred meters to reach the empty lot under the bridge that doubled as a roller rink. This distance seemed insurmountable, for while I skittered over it, I was entirely vulnerable and defenseless. I imagined snipers lying in wait on the rooftops flanking the single-lane road opposite, rifles aimed at the people below. I knew of course that this was nonsensical, that it was only my anxiety talking.

One night in late spring of 2013, as my insomnia worsened and my breathing became increasingly shallow—Why must you breathe like that? my daughter had complained to me one day—I was startled awake around one o’clock from a nightmare. Giving up on sleep altogether, I went outside to buy some water. There wasn’t anyone about, not even a passing car, which made the traffic lights seem redundant. But I stood and waited for the signal to turn green, my mind drifting as I gazed at the blazing twenty-four-hour convenience store on the other side of the two-lane road that led to the apartment complex. When I refocused, there was a line of about thirty men walking single file along the opposite sidewalk. Their hair was long, they were in reserve-forces uniform, and though each carried a shoulder rifle, they dawdled like tired children on a school excursion, their feet dragging and their postures slack and undisciplined.

When someone who hasn’t slept soundly in a while, who is stumbling through a period of nightmares blurring with reality, chances across a scene that defies belief, they may well initially doubt themselves. Am I actually seeing this? Surely this must be part of my nightmare? And: How much can I trust my own senses?

The men were enveloped in a hushed silence, as though someone had hit the mute button on the scene unfolding before me. I remained still, following their backs with my eyes until the last one disappeared around the murky crossroads. It wasn’t a dream. I wasn’t the least bit drowsy and I hadn’t been drinking. But neither could I quite believe what I’d seen. I told myself the men may be out on night training, as after all there was a reserve-forces training area in Naegok-dong, just past Umyeonsan. However, that would imply that the men had marched a dozen kilometers over the hill at this late hour and in the pitch dark. Whether this was commensurate training for a reserve troop, I didn’t know. The next morning, I felt a strong urge to call any of my acquaintances who had done their mandatory service to ask if it was, but I also didn’t want to be considered eccentric, as I felt I was being. To this day, I have not breathed a word of that night to anyone.

---

Alongside women unknown to me, I climbed down the well, helping them to hold on to their children. We thought it would be safe down there, but without warning a shower of bullets rained down on us from above. The women clasped the children against their bodies, shielding them as best they could. From the bottom of what we’d thought was a dry well, a grassy liquid, viscous like melted rubber, oozed out and quickly rose around us. Engulfing our blood and our screams.

---

I was walking along a deserted road with some companions whose faces I cannot recall. We came across a black passenger car parked on the shoulder, and someone said, He’s in there. No name was mentioned, but we understood immediately that the one who had ordered the massacre that spring was in the car. As we stood watching, the car pulled away and turned onto the premises of a large stone building. Someone said, We should follow. We headed toward the building. There were several of us when we set out, but by the time we stepped inside the empty building, only two of us, including myself, remained. Someone stood quietly by my side. I sensed that the person was a man, and that he seemed to be following me reluctantly. We were only two—what could two people possibly do? Light leaked from a room at the end of the dim hall. When we stepped inside, the mass murderer was standing with his back to a wall. He held a lighted match in one hand. That’s when I realized that my companion and I were each holding a match as well. We could speak for as long as the matches burned. No one had told us, but we knew that was the rule. The murderer’s match was almost burned out, the flame down to his thumb. Our matches remained but were burning fast. Murderer, I thought I should say. I opened my mouth.

Murderer.

My voice refused to come out.

Murderer.

Louder, I had to speak louder.

What are you going to do about all the people you’ve killed? I said, using every last ounce of energy I had.

Then I wondered if we were supposed to kill him now, if this would be the last chance any of us had. But how? How could we possibly? I glanced to my side and saw the orange flame of my companion’s frail matchstick—my companion of faint face and breath—wane. In that light I sensed with vivid clarity how young the keeper of that match was. He was only a gangling boy.

---

I finished the manuscript and visited my publisher in January of the following year. I wanted to ask that they publish the book as quickly as possible. For I’d thought, foolishly, that once it was out, the nightmares would cease. My editor told me it would be better in terms of promotion to push the launch to May.

Wouldn’t it be best to time the release so that one more person is likely to pick it up? they asked.

I was persuaded by those words. While I waited, I rewrote another chapter of the book. Then it was the editor’s turn to rush me, until I at last handed in the final manuscript in April. The book came out almost to the day in mid May. The nightmares, unsurprisingly, continued regardless. In retrospect it baffles me. Having decided to write about mass killings and torture, how could I have so naively—brazenly—hoped to soon shirk off the agony of it, to so easily be bereft of its traces?

---

Then there is the night I awoke from that black forest and covered my eyes with the palm of my cold hand.

Sometimes, with some dreams, you awake and sense that the dream is ongoing elsewhere. This dream is like that. As I eat my meals, drink my tea, ride the bus, walk hand in hand with my child, pack our bags ahead of a trip, or walk up the countless stairs out of a

Reviews for We Do Not Part

[rmarcin-630843 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I didn't really know what to expect from this book, but I knew it would be beautifully written since it won the Nobel Prize for literature. I was surprised at the bond of friendship between the two women.
I was also not aware of the tragic history that was told in the story. I didn't know about the terrors that happened in Korea, and this book tells of the tragedy in a unique way. Weaving between reality and dreams, the story of the war and the deaths is revealed.
I will likely read another book by this author, as this one was so unique.

[maryreinert · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Why do all big prize winner need to be so non-linear, obscure, and weird. A Korean woman who is in depression is called to her friends bedside to go rescue a pet bird. She does so going back to the island off Korea where apparently a terrible violent and unspeakable massacre occurred some years before including family members.

I sort of got into it at first, then I wasn't sure (probably the reader is not supposed to be ) of what was really happening, what was a dream, or flash backs. I will say the description of the area, etc. was very good and believable. I do not mean this to be flippant; I'm just probably not smart enough of have enough patience to appreciate this properly.

[dreesie-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This my third Kang (I think?) and honestly don't remember much about the other two. I think I may remember more about this one.

Trauma, memory, friendship, history--when her friend Inseon is hospitalized, Kyungha travels to Inseon's home on Jeju. It is midwinter, there is a horrible storm, and Inseon's pet bird is alone and will not survive without food and water. Kyungha knows that Inseon needs this bird--after the loss of her other bird and her mother, Inseon is an artist who lives an isolated life, still struggling with what the Jeju massacre meant for her family.

So Kyungha goes. She knows it will be a hard trip, with the snow and cold and the darkness. While there, she learns so much about the massacre, the war, and Inseon's family. From Inseon. Did one or both of them die? Is Inseon's home magical?

[ramrak_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Excoriating, fabulous.

[kristelh_15 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Reason read: I don't remember why I decided to read it, but Han Kang is a Nobel Prize Laureate. Han Kang and explores the Jeju massacre of 1948-1949, a dark chapter in Korean Ihistory, through the eyes of a woman named Kyungha who travels to Jeju Island to care for her friend Inseon's pet bird, revealing the generational trauma and the importance of remembering the past. The novel explores themes of memory, trauma, friendship, and the importance of remembering and confronting the past, even when it is painful. It has a dreamy quality with snow and darkness.

[kalliegrace · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I just read Human Acts a few weeks ago, so this flows naturally from that experience. The once close, now distant relationship between two women who are now reuniting in difficult circumstances draws you in and provides a path through the horrific events of the past. I would love to spend time revisiting this, as I was very focused on the history pieces and a bit lost in the dream like present.

[jscape2000 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Vonnegut called Ambrose Bierce's short story "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" the perfect story. Han Kang takes the kernel of that psychological thriller to a subtle but maximalist extreme.

Kyungha rushes to the hospital bed of an old friend who has suffered a gruesome injury. Will Kyungha go take care of the friend's bird?
After getting lost and disoriented in a blizzard, Kyungha reaches her friend's house. In the magical hallucinations that follow, I wonder which or if both of them had died.

But maybe the answer is neither, and instead both are haunted by the Jeju massacre and the brutal history of war and violence that divided the Korean peninsula.

The storms and traumas compound each other, as the personal, political and meteorological layer together. As difficult a read as I've tackled in a while because of its content, I was drawn forward by the masterful text and the tension that permeates each scene.

[kcaroth1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

In We Do Not Part by Han Kang, the author again returns to a long-suppressed part of Korean history—the massacres in the late 1940’s of supposed communists and leftist sympathizers. The story unfolds through the eyes of two women as they attempt to get past their current day struggles to reconcile the past and what their families experienced.

There is stunningly beautiful, poetic writing here that both cocoons the reader inside of the story at times but also works to keep the reader at a distance at other times. It is a strange combination of immediacy and distance as dreams, reality, shadows and swirling snow disorient and play with time and place. Although the references to snow were so frequent, they almost became too much; it was such a good symbol for covering things up while providing a path, cold and suffering but with the ability to insulate, softness and beauty with harshness and silence.

Kang’s exploration of these dark historical periods, both in this novel and in “Human Acts,” is significant. It personalizes nearly unbearable situations, prompting us to reflect on past and present circumstances more directly. This novel is memorable and will reveal new insights with each reading.

Thank you to Random House /Hogarth and NetGalley for the digital ARC.

[bibleblaster · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Brilliant, haunting, poetic, profound, brutal, tender...yeah, I'm running out of words. Read the ones contained in this book.

[ozzer_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Most Americans don’t know what started the Korean War. We may know that a commission mandated that the country be divided to end the conflict, but do we know that the brutal massacre of 10% of the population of an island off Korea’s southern coast may have started it? Furthermore, do we know that this was done in the name of anti-communism and with the full support of the American government? Kang’s remarkable novel focusses on this atrocity as a way to explore the lasting impacts of violence on the human psyche. She asks if faith in the goodness of humanity is possible in the face of our violent solutions to political problems and if it is possible to ever move on from such violence.

Kang sets her novel on the island of Jeju. Her protagonist, Kyungha, seems to be a loose representation of herself. Not unlike Kang, Kyungha has written a book about an atrocity and remains severely troubled by those events. The only other voice in the novel is Inseon, a documentary filmmaker. These two artists, one with words and the other with images, have had a long and successful collaboration. However, Inseon has since moved on after providing long term dementia care for her mother on Jeju.

The plot begins simply enough but rapidly becomes unpredictable. Inseon is recovering from a severe injury in Seoul and asks her friend to go to Jeju to rescue her pet birds. Initially, this seems like a weird request, but if one accepts that the birds may represent the human spirit for Kang, it becomes more reasonable. Kang also uses the image of a major blizzard on the island as a metaphor for how snow can cover up things and can be quite beautiful in the short term but has the potential to be dangerous. And in the end, snow always melts, and the problems it covers re-emerge.

Kang’s plot quickly becomes disorienting when it adopts a mysterious and eerie mood. Spirits begin to appear in Inseon’s isolated and darkened home. First, the dead and buried bird comes back to life. Then Inseon herself appears. We never learn if these ghosts are real or imagined, but this seems immaterial to the progress of the story because Kyungha’s friend is there to document her mother’s account of the Jeju atrocity. From this point, the story becomes a documentary, and it takes on a tone that emphasizes the importance to the healing process of bearing witness to atrocities. Ultimately, the message of this intensely lyrical work of fiction seems hopeful. The way out from tragic memories is not away from them but through them.

[booklove2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Many believe that the Korean War started only when North Korea invaded South Korea. But this book highlights one of the political events that may have led to the Korean War, even before that: the massacre of Jeju Island in South Korea in the late 1940s. After defeating Japan in World War II, the U.S. ended Japan's 35-year-long colonial occupation of Korea, so it is questionable how much to blame the U.S. is for the actions that happened, the apologies never made, the bodies never recovered. And Han Kang possibly wanted to narrow in and focus on an event that probably not many Americans even know about, seeing as how the victims and families of the victims felt they needed to keep silent about it so as not to bring down repercussions from those that caused the massacre. The main character here could be Han Kang herself, haunted by grim research for a book of a 1980 massacre. That book COULD be 'Human Acts'. That research COULD have massively changed her life. The main character has a photographer/filmmaker friend that is also very changed by research. I think this book is partially about the dangers to the psyche of someone who goes into a historical research wormhole. Trying to maintain connection through catastrophe. Sometimes the book is a bit confusing, but this sort of book is necessary to remind us of past events. The book was decent enough for me... books that are open ended/vague are tough for me. Though I'm trying not to be the butthead that is holding this to a higher standard because the writer recently won the Nobel prize. ...But it is what it is. This book is like the combination of real life horrific events, like 'Human Acts', with the mysterious surrealism of 'The Vegetarian'.

[nancyadair-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

There must have been somebody she wanted to save? Isn’t that why she looked back? from We Do Not Part by Han King

Why do we dwell on the past? Why do we allow it to turn us into stone, unable to fully live, move on? Can art expel the demons that torment us? Does telling the story heal?

Han Kang’s new novel flails the veil of silence to remember a horrendous chapter in Korean history. The story of two women whose parents lived through the systematic mass murder of entire villages is as chilling as the blizzard of snow that envelopes the story.

Kyungha, depressed and in statis, is called to help her friend Inseon who is hospitalized. Kyungha travels through a snow storm to her friend’s home on the isolated island of Jeju. The surrealistic journey and experience at her friend’s house brings Kyungha to the intersection of dream and reality as she remembers the stories Inseon told of researching the horrors her parents lived through, their people exterminated in an effort to stop a few suspected communist partisans.

Shining a light on this history had to be a painful act of courage.

Thanks to the publisher for a free book through NetGalley.